Published:PravdaNo. 13, January 17, 1913.

      Signed:V..

      Published according to thePravdatext.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,[1975],

      Moscow,Volume 18,

      pages489-490.Translated:Stepan ApresyanTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2004).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Thisnewspaper has already noted the failure, in the
Council of State, of the Duma Bill to introduce a Zemstvo in Archangel
Gubernia. But it is well worth dwelling once more on the importance of this
fact, which, for all its in significance, is highly characteristic.

Foralmost half a century there has existed a Zemstvo of the nobility,
one which guarantees the absolute preponderance of the feudal type oflandlord. And only in some gubernias, such as Vyatka Gubernia,
where there is hardly any landed nobility, the Zemstvo has more of a muzhik
character. However, there it is enmeshed even more in all kinds of
bureaucratic bans, impediments, restrictions and specifications. It would
seem that it is this sort of harmless, curtailed Zemstvo that Archangel
Gubernia, too, has been seeking for over a half century.

Andnow the resolution of the Black-Hundred, landlord and bourgeois
Third Duma to introduce a Zemstvo in Archangel Gubernia has beenrejectedby the Council of State. What a glaring light this
“trifle” sheds on theessenceof our “renovated” system! What
a splendid lesson on the class roots of politics!

Thearguments of the opponents of the Zemstvo on the Council of State
are frank—there is no nobility there, you see. “Private” landownership
in the whole gubernia amounts to a mere 2,660 dessiatines, exclaimed
Mr. Stishinsky, the reporter in the Council of State.

Itfollows that where there is no landed nobility, the “people” are
not mature enough even to deal with the repair of roads and the building of
hospitals. But if there are no landlords, they should be implanted,
directly or indirectly.

Implantedfrom where? From central Russia, where they are numerous
enough. The landlords of the black-earth central region where the vestiges
of serfdom are freshest, where more is left of the corvée (labour
service) system than anywhere else, and where diehards like those in Kursk
Gubernia rule and reign and govern—those are the ones to rely on where
government and public affairs are concerned. In this sense, the attitude of
the Council of State to the question of a Zemstvo in Archangel Gubernia is
a most instructive and graphic lesson in our statehood.